The usual beginning is in connection with an acquaintanceship, keeping company, which is not necessarily regarded by either side as preliminary to marriage but as a means of having a good time. The charm of the girl is an asset, a lure, which she may use as a means of procuring entertainment, affection, and perhaps gifts. Where marriage was assumed as an object of association, marriage was also assumed as the payment which the girl would ultimately make as her contribution to the expense of the association, but in the more casual associations of the “great society” there has grown up a code that the girl shall pay something as she goes, and she does not pay in cash but in favors. Girls of the class who have “fellows” tend to justify sexual intimacy if they are “going to marry”, if the man says he will marry if there are “consequences”, if the relation is with only one man, and not for money. These are called “charity girls” by the professional prostitutes. When the girl has had some experience in sexual life she will multiply and commercialize her casual relationships. Girls talk of these matters, say “they all do it”, create a more favorable opinion of it, and show the less sophisticated girl how to make easy money. The shop or office girl who makes sexual excursions does not usually become a public prostitute. Her work is more attractive, her income better, she has more class, frequently a home, and she may often find marriage among her acquaintances. There are also girls who do not work, who live in comfortable homes, and are yet found on the street; married women who prostitute themselves in order to have luxuries; women who go on the street when work is slack and return to work; others who limit their relations to a small group of men; mistresses who are promiscuous between periods when they are kept by one man; factory girls and other workers who regularly supplement the work of the day by work on the street. There is thus a general tendency to avoid identification with the prostitute class. Illegal sexual relations are becoming more individualized. Even regular prostitution is not and has never been so fixed a status as we should suppose; it is rather a transitory stage from which the girl seeks to emerge by marriage or otherwise. In his profound work on French prostitution Parent-Duchatelet pointed out that “prostitution is for the majority only a transitory stage; it is abandoned usually during the first year. Very few prostitutes continue until extinction.”[76] And this is confirmed by other reports. Document No. 70 represents a type of organization which has arisen in connection with occasional prostitution, and in No. 71 the girl operates independently.